1954
1953 1954 1955 Events * Kenji Mizoguchi releases A Story of Chikamatsu and Sansho the Bailiff. The latter wins Venice Film Festival Prize. * China's population is 602.66 million. * American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is established to lobby Congress on behalf of Israel. * Mircea Eliade publishes The Myth of the Eternal Return. * William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell publish McCarthy and His Enemies. * Robert A. Heinlein publishes anti-religious fundamentalist sci-fi novel Revolt in 2100. * Gordon Allport publishes The Nature of Prejudice. * Ernest Hemingway receives the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 (The Old Man and the Sea is cited). * Norwegian biologist Johan Rudd publishes his discovery that the Antarctic icefish lacks red blood cells, the only such vertebrate. Timeline January * January 4: Che Guevara meets Cuban Ñico López, a veteran of the Moncada attack, in Guatemala City. * January 15: Mau Mau revolutionary leader Waruhiu Itote is captured. * January 17: Milovan Djilas, political theorist and Yugoslav dictator Josep Broz Tito's numero due, is purged. February * February 18: Church of Scientology established in Los Angeles, California. In an interesting coincidence, the Unification Church is founded in South Korea in 1954. March * March 1: Puerto Rican freedom fighters/terrorists led by Lolita Lebron open fire in the U.S. House of Representatives. Five Representatives were wounded. Their attack was a violent protest against the United States' "military occupation" of their country. The attackers were released from prison in 1979. * March 1: Fukuryu Maru Incident. The United States conducts the largest ever test of nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll with the open-air detonation of hydrogen or fusion weapon called Bravo Shot. Bikini islanders displaced and their island poisoned with radioactivity. Fallout from the blast lands on the crew of the Japanese tunaboat Fukuryi Maru V or Lucky Dragon 5 80 nautical miles away. One dies and others are sickened by radiation poisoning. * March 4: Japanese parliament approves budget for nuclear power development. * March 30: Toronto subway opens (first in Canada). April * Soviet KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Petrov defects to Australia. * April 22: Anti-communist U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy launches hearings to investigate How the United States Army has been "soft" on Communism. May * May 7: French surrender to the Viet Minh ends the battle of Dien Bien Phu * May 17: The U.S. Supreme Court declares that segregated schools violates the 14th Amendment in the case Brown v. Board of Education. June * June 2: Report on producing H-bombs presented to the British Chiefs of Staff by the Working Party on the Operational Use of Atomic Weapons (OAW). The British Chiefs eventually recommend producing a British H-bomb a goal to be achieved by 1958. * June 7: British mathematician, WWII code-breaker and marathon athlete Alan Turing either commits suicide or is murdered after consuming an apple laced with cyanide. British secret services believed Turing was a security threat because he was gay. * June 17: Vietnamese "Emperor" Bao Dai names Ngô Đình Diệm as premier of South Vietnam. * June 17: U.S. supported invasion of democratic Guatemala from Honduras by 150 wingnut exiles and a professional disinformation operation. * June 27: Democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz is forced to resign. July * July 16: Maurice Papon is appointed secretary-general of the French protectorate of Morocco. * July 21: Geneva Accords on Indochina concluded. The U.S. is limited to 342 military personnel in Vietnam. * July 28: Hugo Chavez is born in the rural village of Sabaneta in los llanos. August * August 7: Future American spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard is born in Galveston, Texas. Mordechai Vanunu will be born two months later. * August 30: Future President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko is born September * September 18-25: Soviet defector ex-KGB Lt. Col. Vladimir Petrov publishes serialized "Empire of Fear" in People Magazine. * September 21: Che Guevara arrives in Mexico City. October * October 14: Mordechai Vanunu (מרדכי ואנונו‎), a.k.a. John Crossman, is born. * October 21: John F. Kennedy undergoes surgery for a back injury he received during the PT-109 incident. * October 28: Pakistani Governor General Ghulam Mohammed orders police to prevent members of the Constituent Assembly from meeting in Karachi. Pakistani liberal democracy is mortally wounded. November * November 14: Condoleezza Rice is born. * November 28: Enrico Fermi dies. December * December 2: The U.S. Senate censures Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy for misconduct, effectively ending the reign of McCarthyism. * December 27: Xinhua news Agency reports more than 400,000 agricultural cooperatives have been established in China.